Forum for Science, Industry and Business

South Asian Scots have increased risk of heart attacks

05.07.2007

Scots of South Asian descent are significantly more likely to suffer a heart attack than the rest of the Scottish population, according to a report published in the online open access journal BMC Public Health. The good news is that they are also more likely to survive this traumatic event than their non-Asian countrymen.

At the University of Edinburgh, research funded by The Scottish Executive and led by Dr Raj Bhopal and Colin Fischbacher, linked information on individual ethnic groups from the 2001 Census to Scottish hospital discharge and mortality data. One-way encryption techniques, know as 'hashing', were used on the data, to preserve anonymity. The results showed that South Asian men had a 45 percent higher incidence of heart attack, and South Asian women an 80 percent higher chance than the rest of the population.

Previous studies suggested that people of Asian descent have a higher incidence of heart attack than people of other ethnic origins, which is worrying in Scotland, a country internationally notorious for heart disease. The higher survival rate may be due to Asian communities tending to live in the inner cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, potentially enabling them to get to hospital quickly. Increased awareness of heart disease amongst Asian populations may also be a factor.

A person's ethnicity is seldom recorded in UK National Health Service (NHS) records; so investigating how this relates to health has proved difficult on a large scale. The data-handling techniques developed for this study will hopefully overcome the glaring absence of cohort studies reporting by ethnic group in Europe.

“There is an obligation to ensure that potential ethnic inequalities are highlighted so that they can be assessed and addressed,” says Bhopal. “We have shown how to innovatively, and anonymously link census and health databases to produce this vital information.”

Die letzten 5 Focus-News des innovations-reports im Überblick:

Physicists of the University of Würzburg have made an astonishing discovery in a specific type of topological insulators. The effect is due to the structure of the materials used. The researchers have now published their work in the journal Science.

Topological insulators are currently the hot topic in physics according to the newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Only a few weeks ago, their importance was...

In recent years, lasers with ultrashort pulses (USP) down to the femtosecond range have become established on an industrial scale. They could advance some applications with the much-lauded “cold ablation” – if that meant they would then achieve more throughput. A new generation of process engineering that will address this issue in particular will be discussed at the “4th UKP Workshop – Ultrafast Laser Technology” in April 2017.

Even back in the 1990s, scientists were comparing materials processing with nanosecond, picosecond and femtosesecond pulses. The result was surprising:...

A multi-institutional research collaboration has created a novel approach for fabricating three-dimensional micro-optics through the shape-defined formation of porous silicon (PSi), with broad impacts in integrated optoelectronics, imaging, and photovoltaics.

Working with colleagues at Stanford and The Dow Chemical Company, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign fabricated 3-D birefringent...

In experiments with magnetic atoms conducted at extremely low temperatures, scientists have demonstrated a unique phase of matter: The atoms form a new type of quantum liquid or quantum droplet state. These so called quantum droplets may preserve their form in absence of external confinement because of quantum effects. The joint team of experimental physicists from Innsbruck and theoretical physicists from Hannover report on their findings in the journal Physical Review X.

“Our Quantum droplets are in the gas phase but they still drop like a rock,” explains experimental physicist Francesca Ferlaino when talking about the...